European History

This is one of the most comprehensive works on this subject. It includes not only detailed descriptions of relatively well-known events (September 1939, the Battle of Britain, Monte Cassino, and Warsaw Uprising) but also lesser-known ones such as Poles fighting a large-scale guerrilla war at home (1939-1945), fighting as fliers in the anti-German Allied air war (1940-1945), and fighting as regular soldiers in 1940 western Europe, in 1942-1943 Africa, in post-1941 Soviet Union, in 1943-1945 Italy, and in 1944-1945 post-D-Day western Europe
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This book, besides describing the air battles of the Battle of Britain, offers biographical detail on the Polish pilots. The author, Richard King, is an Englishman with no trace of Polish ancestry. He simply became fascinated with the contributions of the Polish aviators, and decided to thoroughly research the topic and write this book.
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This book (review based on 1946 edition) is probably the first English-language book on the subject of Polish deportees. In the Preface, poet T. S. Eliot summarizes the Polish sacrifices and contributions to the Allied victory in WWII, and puts the Polish experience in the broader context of the barbarization of Europe because of the Nazis and Communists.
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Instead of repeating the many other reviewers, I focus on certain issues. To begin with, accusations have been leveled against the author for being calloused towards Jewish deaths. In actuality, he sympathetically describes the human scenes of suffering, such as the dead and trampled infants in the death trains, the sick being shot and dumped into the pyres, entire transports of Jews going up in smoke, etc. However, he does mention the Jewish kapos.
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This work consists of dozens of 2-4 page testimonies of Poles who lived in the Soviet-annexed Kresy (Poland's pre-WWII eastern half), and who were deported in 1940-1941 as "enemies of the people" by the Soviet Communist authorities and NKVD. The testimonies touch on prewar life and the start of WWII in 1939, the early Soviet occupation, the fateful night of arrest and deportation, and long trip to the Gulags, the unspeakable living and working conditions there, the many deaths in the Gulags, the "amnesty" caused by Nazi Germany attacking its erstwhile Soviet ally in June 1941, the freed surviving remnants of the Gulags gathering in the southern USSR, the participation in the Battle of Monte Cassino, and the post-WWII life in various countries (especially the USA).
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German propaganda portrayed the forced confinement of Jews in ghettos as a protective measure against typhus. When typhus epidemics did not break out, the Germans changed their story. They now said that Jews had a natural symbiosis with lice, which was why they could easily spread typhus while not becoming ill themselves, and for which reason they still had to be isolated. (p. 43). Although the ghettoization of the Jews failed to starve and sicken them out of existence, the mortality rate was nevertheless 13 times that of the natural prewar rate. (p. 50)
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Balto-Slavic past of Kaliningrad should be included in the rich history of this strategically important region of Europe. Thus the early interest in establishing an international rule of law in Poland was caused by a forgery committed by the German Armed Brethren, who obtained a temporary fief of Chełmno from Konrad I of Mazovia (1187–1247) in 1228 in the Act of Kruszwica. The temporary fief of Chełmno was obtained by the Teutonic Knights for the time needed to convert the Balto-Slavic Prussians to Christianity.
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